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Happy Friday the 13th!

I’m not superstitious. I walk under ladders, have two black cats and got married on June 13th. And yes, it was a Friday.

In our house, Friday the 13th is a day to celebrate. And when that Friday the 13th falls during the month of June, it’s doubly special. The last time that happened was 2014. It won’t happen again until 2025. Some people told us we were crazy planning a wedding for Friday the 13th. But everything went off without a hitch. Well, almost.

At the time, my husband-to-be was in the Florida National Guard. Right before we were going to order his ring, riots broke out in the Liberty City part of Miami, and his unit was activated. By the time he was able to come back home, we were running out of time. We got the ring ordered, but it didn’t arrive until the Monday after our wedding. So we ended up borrowing one. In all of our wedding pictures, my husband is wearing my ex-boyfriend’s ring!

Sometime back, I booked a transatlantic cruise for our anniversary. The last ship we were on, the top deck was deck 13. It was where they had putt-putt golf, basketball courts, the rock climbing wall and several other activities. In checking out the floor plan of the ship we’ll be going on this time, it goes from deck 12 to deck 14. There is no deck 13.

The fear of the number 13 is a real thing—it’s called triskaidekaphobia. A lot of skyscrapers have no 13th floor, because even if the owner of the building doesn’t have the phobia, they choose to avoid problems with superstitious tenants. In China, in addition to floor 13, they’ll sometimes also skip floors 4 and 14, because of the similarity between the pronunciation of the words “four” and “death” in Chinese.

At least in America, the superstitious only have one number to avoid. Two if you count 666. But that would be a topic for a whole different post.